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If he isn't dead he...

Almost nothing is known of the man's identity. Shortly after the incident, British tabloid the Sunday Express named him as Wang Weilin, a 19-year-old student; however, the veracity of this claim is dubious. What has happened to Wang following the demonstration is equally obscure. In a speech to the President's Club in 1999, Bruce Herschensohn - former deputy special assistant to President of the United States Richard Nixon and a member of the President Ronald Reagan transition team - reported that he was executed 14 days later; other sources say he was killed by firing squad a few months after the Tiananmen Square protests. In Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now, Jan Wong writes that the man is still in hiding in mainland China.

As one of the Chinese pro-democracy movement's leaders remarked, there is more than one hero in the Tank Man picture. Besides the person who risked his life stepping in front of the war machine, there is the tank driver who disobeyed his orders and refused to overrun his compatriot.

As with most matters related to the Tiananmen Square protests, the Tank Man topic is still a political taboo in mainland China, where any discussion of it is regarded as inappropriate or risky.